RvR #14: The BS Word
Tom Emmer dismissed affordability as "the biggest BS word" — at a high school 0.7 miles from a $4.26 gas pump.
On May 2, 2026, Rep. Tom Emmer stood in front of Republican delegates at Elk River High School and said this:
“Everybody is talking about affordability. That’s the biggest BS word I’ve ever seen. It’s always been about the economy, stupid.” — Rep. Tom Emmer, CD6 GOP Endorsing Convention, May 2, 2026
He won the Sixth District GOP endorsement that day with 91.2% of the first-ballot vote.
Three years earlier, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Emmer told his colleagues that Americans were “skipping meals and going hungry because of high food prices” — that this was “a national crisis.”
Two years earlier, his official Whip account posted that “typical American households have to spend an extra $11,400 per year on average just to afford the basics. In Minnesota, it’s even worse at $12,978.”
Now affordability is the biggest BS word he’s ever seen.
This is the story of how Tom Emmer’s word for the most important thing in his constituents’ lives — went from indictment, to credit-claim, to dismissal — without affordability itself ever changing.
The Brand
For four years under Joe Biden, affordability was Tom Emmer’s whole story.
He didn’t talk about it abstractly. He had numbers. He had props. He had a vocabulary built for empathy with the family doing the math at the checkout line.
December 1, 2021. House floor. C-SPAN. Emmer rose to address Thanksgiving food prices. (video)
“Madam Chair, my constituents just experienced the most expensive Thanksgiving dinner in history. A 16-pound turkey is up 23 percent, Costco pumpkin pie is up 17 percent, a two-pound bag of carrots is up nearly 50 percent. Let’s also not forget the outrageous prices at the pump, making it too expensive for many Americans to drive home and celebrate Thanksgiving with their families in the first place. This inflation is not transitory... And it’s not a high-class problem, despite what the Biden administration will tell you. That is a lie propagated by those who have never had to do mental math at the grocery store to make sure the amount in their cart does not exceed the cash in their wallet.”
He understood it. He named it. He stood in solidarity with the people doing the math.
March 1, 2022. Pre-State of the Union. CNN. (video)
“Americans are living in a state of scarcity... I rise today to once again address the crisis hurting every household in America. Runaway inflation.”
June 13, 2023. House Financial Services Committee. To Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, on the record:
“American families pay an average of $864 more per month today than they did when this administration started. That’s an extra $126 on food per month, an extra $159 on shelter per month, and extra $123 on energy per month, just to name a few... Unless Americans have gotten a 15.3% pay raise in the last two years, they’ve effectively gotten a pay cut.”
He had a number. He interrupted the Treasury Secretary to make the point.
March 30, 2023. Floor of the House, on H.R. 1:
“Month after month, families have been slammed with record-breaking gas prices and massive utility bills. Some have even had to choose between filling up their car or putting food on the table for their families.”
This is the brand he built — the brand of a man who understood the kitchen-table math.
He took it to Twitter, too:
September 19, 2022 — @RepTomEmmer:
November 29, 2023 — @GOPMajorityWhip:
February 24, 2024 — @tomemmer:
The vocabulary was relentless. Across his three accounts between January 20, 2021 and January 19, 2025:
381 tweets using affordability or cost-of-living vocabulary
294 mentions of “inflation” alone
57 separate TV appearances and committee hearings where he raised these concerns on camera
That’s the brand. Affordability was not a BS word. It was the word. The word he used to win House Majority Whip, the word he carried into hundreds of media hits, the word he repeated until it became indistinguishable from his identity.
The Inversion
Then Trump took office, and Tom Emmer’s word became something different.
He didn’t stop saying it. He started saying it more.
He said it on Fox News Sunday, on Mornings with Maria, on Bret Baier, on Bloomberg, on the John Fredericks Show, on Twin Cities News Talk. Across 64 transcribed appearances in his second term, the word affordability shows up in 30 of them — six times more than under Biden.
But what he was saying about it had changed.
November 9, 2025 — Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream. Emmer credited Trump for fixing the affordability he had spent four years blaming Biden for breaking. (video)
“Donald Trump’s the one who’s fixing affordability, Donald Trump and the Republicans... Energy prices are down. Grocery prices are down. In fact, gas prices are at a lowest point in five years.”
This was the credit-claim phase. Same word, opposite verdict.
November 19, 2025 — @GOPMajorityWhip:
Then the language started shifting. Affordability stopped being a value that policymakers either delivered or failed at. It started becoming a Democratic talking point — a word to be twisted and turned back on its users.
November 24, 2025 — Mornings with Maria. Fox News Channel.
“It’s the Affordable Care Act that has become the unaffordable Care Act.”
January 14, 2026 — The Chris Stigall Show. Salem Podcast Network.
“It’s not about healthcare. It’s about health insurance. The health insurance industry has absolutely gorged itself off the American public since the unaffordable care act was created.”
And then, four months before he stood at Elk River, Emmer said this part out loud:
February 23, 2026 — The John Fredericks Show.
“Look, I’ll stop with this, John. Who’s their leader? Who’s their leader and what’s their message, right? If they think affordability is the word, well, we just say waste, fraud, and abuse. If they say health care, Donald Trump’s already doing it. We say health insurance.”
That is the play. He explained it on tape. Affordability is no longer something he addresses for his constituents. With his party now controlling both the White House and Congress, the word has lost its political utility. So it becomes something they — Democrats, the opposition, the naysayers — say. The Republican response is to substitute different words. Waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s what fills the airtime now.
Read that John Fredericks quote next to the December 2021 Thanksgiving floor speech. The man who wanted constituents to know he understood the mental math at the grocery store has decided the word for that math is now an opposing party’s branding.
This was not Emmer freelancing. The administration was running the same script.
May 6, 2026 — National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, on Fox Business Mornings with Maria:
“Credit card spending is through the roof. They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else, too.”
Hassett offered this as good news.
It is not. According to a December 2025 Academy Bank study, roughly three-quarters of Americans are using credit cards to pay for essentials — groceries, medical bills, routine living costs. A March 2026 Century Foundation study found about a third of the U.S. population was unable to pay their full credit card balance last year. Outstanding U.S. credit card debt sits at about $1.2 trillion. The average APR is 23.8%.
Americans are not spending more on everything because they feel confident. They are spending more because everything costs more, and when the cash runs out, they put it on a card at 23.8% interest.
Austin Kilgore of the Achieve Center for Consumer Insights put it directly: “Rising credit card usage does not signal financial strength. For many, it’s a coping mechanism to make ends meet.”
This is the position the Trump administration was defending in early May.
It is the same position Tom Emmer brought to Elk River.
March 27, 2026 — Twin Cities News Talk. Five weeks before the BS-word speech.
“The issue is we have perception that we aren’t there yet. And we’ve got reality that, you know what, nobody’s talking about eggs anymore. And they want to complain about gas because of the Iran experience... So I think perception and reality will intersect sometime at the end of the summer, early fall.”
He was rehearsing the BS-word position on the radio. The exact same frame — “perception and reality have not yet met” — that he would deliver to delegates from a podium five weeks later.
Elk River was not a slip. It was the script.
What “BS” Costs in MN-06
Emmer made his speech in Elk River. Let’s stay in Elk River.
The average price of a gallon of regular gas in Minnesota over the last five months looked like this:
December 20, 2025 — Anoka County, lowest reported regular price: $2.43/gallon. (Anoka Times / GasBuddy data)
March 18, 2026 — Twin Cities metro average: $3.49/gallon. (Star Tribune)
April 1, 2026 — MN statewide average: $3.68/gallon. (AAA)
May 1, 2026 — MN statewide: $4.01. Diesel: $5.21. (AAA)
May 2, 2026 — Emmer tells delegates affordability is “the biggest BS word I’ve ever seen.”
May 4, 2026 — Twin Cities metro: $4.08. Statewide: $4.05. Most expensive single station in Minnesota: $4.91. (FOX 9 / GasBuddy)
May 5, 2026 — MN statewide: $4.20. Diesel: $5.44 — within 13 cents of the all-time MN record of $5.57. (KTTC / GasBuddy)
May 8, 2026 — MN statewide: $4.19. A year ago: $2.94. That is $1.25 more per gallon, year-over-year. (AAA via KEYC News)
A driver in MN-06 who fills up a 15-gallon tank weekly is paying roughly $80 more per month for the same gas they bought a year ago. A contractor running a diesel work truck pays more.
There’s a Marathon station 0.7 miles from Elk River High School, where Emmer gave his speech. As of May 9, regular at that pump was $4.26 per gallon — within 50 cents of the all-time Minnesota record Emmer himself once cited as the high-water mark of Biden-era catastrophe.
He drove past it.
Groceries are not an exception:
Beef and veal prices nationally: up 12.1% year-over-year as of March 2026. (USDA Economic Research Service)
Wholesale beef: up 19.7% year-over-year. (USDA)
Farm-level cattle prices: up 16.2% year-over-year. (USDA)
Coffee: up 18.8% from December 2024 to December 2025. (USDA)
Food-away-from-home (restaurants): up 3.8% year-over-year as of March 2026. (USDA)
This matters in MN-06 because Stearns County, in the heart of the district, is Minnesota’s #1 cattle county and Minnesota’s #1 dairy county. Stearns alone accounts for 10% of all of Minnesota’s cattle. Benton County, also in MN-06, is in the state’s top 10 for dairy.
Stearns County dairy farmers — and they lost 27 herds in 2023 alone to consolidation pressure — are watching a particular squeeze right now. The all-milk price was $17.50/cwt in January 2026, down $6.60/cwt from a year earlier. USDA’s 2026 forecast: $18.95 milk against $19.14 in costs. Most operations are starting the year structurally in the red.
At the grocery store, the same constituents pay 12.1% more for ground beef and 18.8% more for the coffee they drink.
And the trajectory is still up. Gas climbed 25 cents the week of Emmer’s speech alone.
To the family driving from Big Lake to Minneapolis for work, affordability is not BS. It’s the difference between making it to Friday and not.
The word Tom Emmer dismissed is the word his constituents use every day.
The Speech in Full Context
The Elk River dismissal was not a slip. The full passage shows him working out a coordinated frame in real time.
He acknowledged gas prices have risen. He blamed the war with Iran — a war he supports, and which he praised in the same speech as “probably the greatest military achievement in the history of the planet.”
He argued prices remain below Biden-era levels. (The University of Michigan and PolitiFact disagree.)
He told delegates: “You and I know that perception and reality have not yet met.”
This is the tell. When affordability was a Biden problem, it was reality. Now that it’s a Trump problem, it’s perception.
He closed: “After we win the midterms, we will finish the job and reset the economic future for the United States of America.”
The economic future will be reset after the election. Until then, the word is BS.
The Pattern
The position has not changed. The party in power has.
When affordability was a Biden problem (Jan 20, 2021 – Jan 19, 2025):
$864/month in extra costs (to Yellen, June 13, 2023)
$11,400/year nationally, $12,978 in Minnesota (tweet, November 29, 2023)
“Skipping meals & going hungry... a national crisis” (tweet, September 19, 2022)
“Living in a state of scarcity” (CNN, March 1, 2022)
“Choose between filling up their car or putting food on the table” (House floor, March 30, 2023)
381 tweets using affordability/cost-of-living vocabulary
57 transcripts containing the same vocabulary
When affordability is a Trump problem (Jan 20, 2025 – May 9, 2026):
“That’s affordability in action” — when prices were low (November 19, 2025)
“The unaffordable Care Act” — relabeling begins (November 24, 2025)
“If they think affordability is the word, well, we just say waste, fraud, and abuse” (February 23, 2026)
“Perception and reality have not yet met” (March 27, 2026, repeated May 2, 2026)
“The biggest BS word I’ve ever seen” (May 2, 2026)
49 tweets with affordability vocabulary
64 transcripts — but the meaning has flipped
It was never about affordability for him. It was about who the President was.
That’s the gap between rhetoric and reality.
The Naysayers
Four days after Elk River, on May 6, Emmer called into Twin Cities News Talk on KTLK. The host turned the conversation, briefly, to constituents who hold him accountable.
Emmer’s response:
“What I don’t see, what I don’t hear doesn’t exist.”
Later, the host asked about the economy heading into the midterms. Emmer said this:
“All these naysayers who say we aren’t going to hold our majorities come the fall, they talk about affordability, John. It’s always been about the economy, stupid, affordability is the economy, and that is what it’s going to be about again.”
The script from Elk River, four days earlier, on his preferred radio station. Naysayers. Affordability framed as something opponents talk about — not something his constituents are living through.
The word is not for them. It’s for the people who use it as a political weapon against his party. When the cost of living was useful to him, it was a “national crisis,” a pay cut for working families, the most expensive Thanksgiving in history. When it threatened his party, the people raising it became naysayers.
In the same KTLK appearance, talking about the press, he said this:
“They put up shiny objects every day that our worthless media follows instead of digging deep into the fraud that’s there.”
Of 64 transcribed Trump-era TV and committee appearances, zero acknowledge current price pressures without deflecting to Biden. Zero. Across 16 months and roughly half a million spoken words on camera, Emmer has not once accepted that the cost of living in MN-06 is a current problem requiring a current response.
The shiny object is the family doing the math at the checkout line — the family Emmer once said he understood, the family for whom inflation was “not a high-class problem.”
The shiny object is the gas station 0.7 miles from where he gave the speech, charging $4.26.
The shiny object is the Stearns County dairy farm starting 2026 in the red.
The shiny object is the constituent who took the time to write to his official contact form, since February of this year, and never received an answer. There have been hundreds.
The shiny object is “American families pay an average of $864 more per month today than they did when this administration started” — said by him, to the Treasury Secretary, on the record, in 2023. He had the number then. He has different work to do now.
Tom Emmer has decided not to see any of it.
It has been 1,005 days since he last held an in-person town hall in MN-06 to answer for any of this.
What he doesn’t see, what he doesn’t hear, doesn’t exist.
The receipts disagree.
This is Rhetoric vs. Reality #14, a weekly MN-06 Watch series that puts Tom Emmer’s public statements next to the public record.
Receipts, not rage.
Sources
Emmer’s Own Words — Tweets
“skipping meals & going hungry... national crisis” — @RepTomEmmer, Sept 19, 2022
“$11,400 / $12,978 in Minnesota” — @GOPMajorityWhip, Nov 29, 2023
“Bidenflation” definition — @tomemmer, Feb 24, 2024
$4.759 MN gas record benchmark — @GOPMajorityWhip, Mar 14, 2025
“That’s affordability in action” — @GOPMajorityWhip, Nov 19, 2025
“Lowered costs, cooled inflation” — @GOPMajorityWhip, Feb 25, 2026
Tweet vocabulary counts — MN-06 Watch analysis of @tomemmer, @GOPMajorityWhip, @RepTomEmmer archives
Emmer’s Own Words — On Camera
Thanksgiving food prices floor speech — House Committee Hearing, C-SPAN, Dec 1, 2021
“State of scarcity” — pre-SOTU CNN, Mar 1, 2022
H.R. 1 floor speech “choose between gas and food” — C-SPAN, Mar 30, 2023
Yellen $864/month exchange — House Financial Services Committee, C-SPAN, June 13, 2023
Newsmax housing affordability crisis — June 25, 2024
Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream — Nov 9, 2025
Mornings with Maria “unaffordable Care Act” — Nov 24, 2025
Chris Stigall Show “unaffordable care act” — Jan 14, 2026
John Fredericks Show “waste, fraud, and abuse” pivot — Feb 23, 2026
Twin Cities News Talk “perception and reality” preview — Mar 27, 2026
Twin Cities News Talk “what I don’t see, what I don’t hear” — May 6, 2026
Elk River endorsement remarks — Hometown Source / Elk River Star News, Josh Moniz, May 2, 2026
Transcript archive analysis — MN-06 Watch transcription of 831 PDF transcripts, May 2026
Administration Position
Hassett “credit card spending is through the roof” — Fox Business, Mornings with Maria, May 6, 2026
Trump “consumer confidence is way up” rated False — PolitiFact, May 6, 2026
Economic Data
Inflation 2.4% to 3.3% (Feb–Mar 2026) — multiple outlets
Consumer sentiment 53.3 (Mar 2026) — University of Michigan / PolitiFact
Credit card debt $1.2T, average APR 23.8% — LendingTree / CBS News, January 2026
Three-quarters using cards for essentials — Academy Bank, December 2025
One-third unable to pay full balance — Century Foundation, March 2026
19% carrying credit card debt tied to essential living expenses — U.S. News & World Report, May 8, 2026
MN-06 Specific Cost Data
Anoka County December 2025 gas prices ($2.43 regular) — Anoka Times / GasBuddy
MN gas timeline Jan–May 2026 — AAA via KEYC, KTTC, FOX 9, Star Tribune
Marathon station 0.7 mi from Elk River High School at $4.26 — GasBuddy, May 8, 2026
MN statewide $4.19, year-over-year +$1.25 — AAA via KEYC News, May 8, 2026
MN diesel $5.44, near all-time record $5.57 — KTTC, May 5, 2026
Beef +12.1% YoY, wholesale beef +19.7% YoY, cattle +16.2% YoY — USDA Economic Research Service, Food Price Outlook, March 2026
Coffee +18.8% Dec 2024 to Dec 2025 — USDA / FAO
Strait of Hormuz / Iran war gas price impact — KTTC, May 5, 2026
MN-06 Agricultural Profile
Stearns County #1 in MN cattle, #1 in dairy (10% of state cattle) — Minnesota Department of Agriculture
Stearns lost 27 dairy herds in 2023 — Dairy Star, Jan 2024
All-milk price $17.50/cwt January 2026 (down $6.60 YoY) — USDA WASDE, March 2026
2026 forecast: $18.95 milk vs $19.14 costs — USDA Economic Research Service
MN-06 Engagement
Emmer skipped affordability forum — Monticello Times, January 22, 2026
Town hall counter — Last in-person town hall: August 9, 2023, Hamburg, MN
Honestly, Tom Emmer gets uglier by the day with his words. I wonder if his family notices or perhaps he’s always been like this and he can now be himself, safe with MAGA.